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Chocolate (Cup sugar teaspoons butter cup)
½ cup sugar 2 teaspoons butter + cup milk 1 teaspoon sherry wine, or ½ teaspoon vanilla Mix chocolate, add other ingredients, and cook until, when dropped in water, a soft ball is formed.
Chocolate Frosting No. 2 2 ounces Lowney's Premium
A cooked chocolate frosting of the fudge type: sugar, milk, butter and unsweetened chocolate boiled to the soft-ball stage, then beaten to a spreadable gloss. The cooking temperature is the whole recipe.
- Soft ball means 235-240FThe cold-water test described here corresponds to 235-240F on a thermometer. Under that and the frosting never sets; over it and it turns grainy and hard before it reaches the cake.
- The chocolate quantityThe amount of chocolate is not stated in this entry; the text as printed begins mid-list. The following recipe on the page (Chocolate Frosting No. 2) opens with 2 ounces of Lowney's Premium, which may suggest a similar order of magnitude, but any figure used here is a reconstruction rather than the original instruction.
- Milk quantityThe milk measure is not legible as a usable fraction in the text as it stands ('+ cup milk'). A quarter or a third of a cup would both be plausible for this quantity of sugar, but the original figure cannot be recovered.
- Lowney's Premium chocolateThis was plain unsweetened chocolate liquor in cake form, the equivalent of modern unsweetened baking chocolate. Do not substitute semisweet or cocoa powder without adjusting sugar and fat.
- Mix chocolate firstThe direction to mix the chocolate before adding the rest is usually taken to mean working it smooth, generally with a little of the milk over gentle heat, before the sugar goes in. The recipe does not spell this out. Adding a solid cake of chocolate to hot syrup tends to leave specks that are hard to smooth out.
- BeatingThe recipe stops at the soft-ball test and gives no further direction. Frostings of this type are ordinarily cooled somewhat -- to around 110F if you are using a thermometer -- and then beaten until they thicken and dull slightly. Beating while very hot gives a thin glaze; beating too late gives a crumbly mass.
- The sherryThe recipe offers a teaspoon of sherry or, alternatively, half a teaspoon of vanilla. The sherry reads as a warm, slightly nutty note rather than a boozy one; vanilla is the plainer of the two options.
- YieldNo yield is given. On these proportions -- with the milk quantity uncertain -- expect roughly enough to cover the top of a single 8-inch layer. Double it for a fully frosted two-layer cake.
Lowney's cook book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, one of the large American chocolate manufacturers of the turn of the twentieth century, and like the Baker's and Hershey's booklets of the same era it existed to put the firm's product into domestic kitchens by way of recipes. The repeated brand name in the ingredient lines - "Lowney's Premium" - is advertising as much as specification, though it did tell the cook something real: premium chocolate meant plain unsweetened chocolate rather than the sweetened eating chocolate sold alongside it. The cold-water test used here, dropping a bead of syrup into a cup and judging it by feel, was the standard home method for sugar work before inexpensive candy thermometers became common household equipment.